Jewish Way Research Articles

Mark and His Readers: The Son of God among Jews

First, a few remarks about the audience of the Gospel according to Mark. This study is based on the premise that Mark was read aloud in gatherings of Christians in the late first and early second centuries that were not necessarily liturgical in a narrow sense. Further, those who listened were not all equally committed to the Christian faith and probably assimilated and interpreted the instruction that they received in various ways. Some in the audience, even if they were familiar with the Pauline understanding of Jesus as the Son of God, may have preferred to de-fine Jesus' divine sonship in another, more traditionally Jewish way, to be discussed below. Finally, even if the Gospel was written primarily for insiders, it is likely that copies were available to interested or critical outsiders. Celsus's knowl-edge of the Gospels shows that this happened at least by the second half of the second century.

Maurice Friedman and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: Pilgrims to the East

This essay is a personal tribute to the author's mentors, Maurice Friedman and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. The article describes her experiences in Eastern religions as being prototypical of the 1960s generation. For over thirty-five years, Friedman and Schachter have displayed true openness towards a significant segment of a Jewish generation's need for Eastern meditative practices. They have also understood that generation's hunger to find a way to embrace their own Jewish birthright in a meaningful way. As deeply spiritual human beings and brilliant academics with vast reservoirs of knowledge in world religions, philosophy, psychology, literature, and history, they are deeply committed to Jewish tradition and to the Jewish people. They have helped create a bridge for thousands of Jews to return to the practice of religious Judaism. They have modeled the possibility of being open to other traditions, while remaining loyal to the Jewish way.

Anne Roiphe's Ambivalence: A Jewish Feminist Looks at Israel

In a short piece which appeared in the New York Times in December of 1978, Anne Roiphe revealed that her secular Jewish family did not celebrate Chanukah and (worse yet) bought a Christmas tree each year. Her article prompted a hostile response from scores of Jews. Says Roiphe, Housewives, rabbis, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, all but Indian chiefs phoned or wrote in, furious that the paper had published an article that advocated assimilation, displayed ignorance of Judaism, and seemed to express contempt for the Jewish way of (Taking Down the Christmas Tree 58). Roiphe, by her own admission, would not have written the piece had she anticipated the public berating she would subsequently be forced to endure; however, she has reason to be thankful for the unsavory episode. The angry responses to her inflammatory article caused her to reflect upon the importance of Judaism in her life and to recognize that assimilation into the dominant culture had nearly stripped her of this central element of her identity. Roiphe immediately began to study Jewish history and the Talmud. Moreover, she began to explore Jewish issues overtly in her works. One must admire Roiphe's courage. She surely realized that several of those who excoriated her for expressing her alienation from Judaism, as embodied in her purchase of Christmas trees, would be eager to attack her chutzpahdik [nervy] exploration of Jewish issues (chutzpahdik since Jews who allow Christmas trees past their threshold know enough to expect a special kind of scrutiny from fellow

AJL Sydney Taylor Award Presentations, 1994

The Sydney Taylor Awards were established in 1968 to honor the memory of one of the favorite and finest of all children's literature providers. Sydney Taylor, herself, set the standard of teaching about Jewish values and a Jewish way of life through stories. In her memory, her husband, Ralph Taylor, of blessed memory, and now her daughter, Jo Marshall, have provided a handsome prize for the outstanding writers and illustrators of new Jewish juvenile literature. No children's collection should be without these wonderful works.

Therapeutic and redemptive aspects of religious confession

Religious confession provides a forum for the expression of individual identity and relational needs. As a ritual that gives public sanction to personal transformation and redemption, confession also connects the faithful to the larger community. Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish ways of confession are surveyed to examine their historical and contemporary significance. Religious confession not only reflects meaning; it also creates meaning filtered through our psychological understanding of what constitutes sin. Clinical examples illustrate the need for therapists to become more aware of the relationship of their own values and countertransference in spiritual disclosure.

The future of American jewry

American Jewry has moved into a second phase of its adaptation to American society. This phase is characterized by an end of sociological separation, a break-up of older Jewish population centers, the unraveling of Progressive solutions, an end of Amerian isolation and changing American-Israel relations. In this new phase, Jewish survival is threatened by the weakness of the Jewish family, a decline in Jewish observance, and the decline of Jewish communal organization as a basis for Jewish solidarity and of Jewish education as the basis of the Jewish way of life and of the Jewish character. Jewish experience with voluntarism, Jewish inventiveness, imagination and a willingness to experiment will be assets as Jews continue to adapt to America. However, in the final analysis what will be needed is a renewal of the covenental tradition based more on the obligations that parties accept and agree to undertake than on the exercise of rights.

Medicalization and secularization: the Jewish ritual bath as a problem of hygiene (Germany 1820s-1840s).

In the 1820s and 1840s the Jewish ritual bath in Germany was criticized on the basis of medical arguments. Associated with this critique were demands for a change in the traditional Jewish way of life in general, especially as concerning the Jewish religion. The new role assigned to religion can be seen as part of a process of 'secularization'. The criticism of the ritual bath was justified by medical arguments and entailed a demand for an extension of the medical sphere of competence, and thus formed part of a development described as 'medicalization'. An historical investigation of the debate on the Jewish ritual bath illuminates the way in which medicalization and secularization were different aspects of the same process of the attribution of complementary circumscribed spheres of medicine and religion.

Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt (review)

Book Reviews 129 and a clear understanding of the link between the Jewish way of life and non-naturalistic forms of theatrical expression. These many memories unfold like a great epic film, and though the transitions from one section to the next often show their seams, this is an unforgettable saga that breathes life into history. When we approach the final sections, it should be noted, the narrative seems to leave us a bit empty. Perhaps we're in denial, unwilling to accept the missing voice of Mr. Joseph Buloff, whose accounts are so filled with life that we don't want them to end. Thanks to the work of Ms. Kadison, we need only turn back the pages. Richard Stockton Rand Department of Visual and Performing Arts Purdue University Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt, by Frank W. Brecher. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. $47.95. Recent scholarship has not reflected kindly upon either American attitudes toward the Jewish struggle in Palestine or the American response to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency spanned the entire Nazi era as well as most of the critical years of the Palestine conflict, emerges as a leader who never permitted humanitarian considerations to override the political advantages of ignoring both the Holocaust and the idea ofJewish statehood. Penetrating studies by Monty Penkower and David Wyman, as well as a host of related works by other scholars, have told the story in considerable detail.? To challenge such a formidable array of scholars is a daunting task, particularly for someone who is not an historian by training. Nonetheless, Mr. Frank Brecher, a veteran State Department officer, leaps into the fray with Reluctant Ally and comes down squarely on the side of FDR and the State Department. Of the four essays in this slim volume, two deal with Woodrow Wilson's Middle East policies, and a third surveys the career of Charles R. 9Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were E:vpendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of theJews: America and the Holocaust 1941-45 (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 130 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 Crane, who briefly cochaired a post-World War I U.S. survey mission to the Mideast. Brecher's chapters on Wilson are interesting, if unexceptional. Because he relies so heavily on Wilson's published papers and on the Foreign Relations of the United States series (as opposed to unpublished documents), there are not many surprises here. Wilson's sympathy for Zionism is recounted, and the impact of his foreign policy on European Jewry is traced through his role in the Paris negotiations leading to the Minorities Treaties. Brecher has fresher material to offer on the rise and fall of the King-Crane Commission, which Wilson sent to the Mideast in 1919, and which returned with anti-Zionist recommendations that were never implemented. A subsequent chapter sheds some interesting light on Crane's activities in the years after the Commission, although Brecher fails to demonstrate that Crane had any real influence on U.S. policy. While claiming that Crane "exercised an important influence on the personal attitudes toward the Middle East of many leading Americans," Brecher names just one person who was actually influenced by Crane-Virginia Gildersleeve, the preSident of Barnard College, who was not exactly a major force in the shaping of American foreign policy. Brecher surveys the U.S. response to early Nazi atrocities, then suddenly digresses into a long discussion of U.S. policy towards the Vichy French administration in North Africa. Brecher's attempt to portray the Vichy episode as a microcosm ofAmerican policy towards European Jewry is not persuasive. Brecher wanders even further afield in the conclusion to his section on Vichy: "American policy [during the Holocaust] did reflect the country's natural humanitarian concern over the fate of the European Jews" since "there was no official interest in the U.S. government to see them destroyed." Such a broad definition of "humanitarian" might easily encompass an assortment of unpleasant individuals and regimes whose policies toward Jews in recent centuries fell short...

Identifying sectarian content for Jewish Early Childhood educational programs

This study identified appropriate sectarian content for Jewish Early Childhood education programs. Using a national sample of early childhood Jewish educators, a Delphi technique was used to identify specific elements of Jewish history and culture considered worthy to be taught to young Jewish children. Seven categories of study were identified: (1) Jewish tradition as expressed in Jewish literature beginning with the Bible and continuing to modern Jewish writings; (2) Jewish way of life (customs and commitments); (3) Hebrew language (written and spoken); (4) Israel as the Holy Land of Jewish tradition and as the modern state; (5) Jewish peoplehood, knowledge of its historic past, its present structure and a desire to identify oneself with its future; (6) Faith in God with the purpose of the betterment of the world and humanity; and (7) Jewish values and attitudes. These categories were validated through a review of the literature on the history of Jewish education and by a panel of experts in Jewish education. A discussion is presented of the content appropriate to young children within each of these categories.

Educating for Judaism through the Bible

Summary Although the Bible is a book of universal knowledge, as a means of Jewish education it shows how the Jewish way of life is acquired and how Jews become attached to that way. The article also shows how the Bible introduces a basic approach to human life.

The media exchange

OVER THEIR DEAD BODIES, by Thomas Mann and Janet Creme, Brattleboro, Vermont: The Stephen Crecne Press, 1962, hardbound, $5.95. ISBN 0-8289-001 7-5. Reviewed by Sandra L Bertman, University of Massachusetts Medical School.THE JEWISH WAY IN DEATH AND MOURNING, by Maurice Lamm, New York: Jonathan David Publishers, 1969 (rev. ed., 1972), + 285 pages, hardbound, $6.95; paperbound, $3.95, ISBN 0-8246-0041-X hardbound; 0-8246-01 26-2 softbound. Reviewed by Paul K. Chafetz, Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Florida.DYING AND DEATH: A Clinical Guide for Caregivers, edited by David Barton, M.D. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1977, 256 pages, soft cover, $14.95, ISBN 0-683-00440-9. Reviewed by Ruth Reko. Continuing Care Unit, Lutheran Medical Center, St. Louis.YOU CANNOT DIE, by Ian Currie, Toronto: Methuen, 1978,288 pages, $9.95. hardbound, ISBN 0458-95750-0. Reviewed by Richard Lonetto. University of GuelphAudiovisual Reviews: COMING TO TERMS WITH LOSS A SERIES OF INTERVIEWSDEATH NOTIFICATION, Film, 23 min, color (rental $65/dc $395). Harper & Row Publishing Company. 2350 Via Avenue, Hagerstown, MD 21740. Reviewed by J. Eugene Knotr, Ph.D., Department of Human Development, Counseling, and Family Studies, University of Rhode IslandAFTER OUR BABY DIED, Film, 20 min, color (rental-free loan by Modem Talking Pictures Service, Inc., 2323 New Hyde Park Road, New Hyde Park, N.Y. 11042/sale $116 from National Audio Visual Center, Order Department, Washington, D.C. 20409). Reviewed by Andrea Parkus Patenuude, Ph.D., Staff Psychologist, Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, MA 021 15.THE SYNDROME OF ORDINARY GRIEF, VC. 32 min, color (rental $50/sale $150). Videotape Library of Clinical Psychiatric Syndromes. University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX 77550. Reviewed by Joanne T. Jozefowski, R.N., Ph.D., Director, Thanatology Resource Center of Massachusetts, Worcester.THE LIFE THAT'S LEFT, Film and VC, 29 min, color (rental $25/sale: film $S75, VC $225). Great Plains National Insauctional Television Library, Box 80669, Lincoln, NE 68501. Reviewed by Michael A. Simpson, M.D., B.S., M.R.C., Psychiatry, D.P.M. Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Temple University, Philadelphia; Convener, International Task Force on Death and Dying.

Isaiah 13-39, by Otto Kaiser (Old Testament Library). SCM Press, London, 1974. 412 pp. £5·75.

Book Review in this Articles:ISAIAH 13‐39, by Otto KaiserJESUS THE JEW: A Historian's Reding of the Gospels, by Geza VermesTHIS IS MY GOD: The jewish Way of Life, by Herman WoukTHE EASTER JESUS, by Gerald O'Collins, S. J. DertonST. THOMAS AQUINAS: SUMMA THEOLOGIA. Vo;l. XXXVI: Predence (lla llae xivii‐lvi), by Thomas Gilby, O.P.WOMEN PRIESTS IN THE CATHOLCI CHRUCH? by Haye van der MeerESSAYS ON FREEDOM OF ACTION, edited by Ted HonderichBLACK CLUBS IN BERMUDA: Ethnography of a Play World, by Frank E. Manning

Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, by Geza Vermes. Collins, London, 1973. 286 pp. £3·15. - This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life, by Herman Wouk. Collins, London, 1973. 320 pp. £2·75.

Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, by Geza Vermes. Collins, London, 1973. 286 pp. £3·15. - This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life, by Herman Wouk. Collins, London, 1973. 320 pp. £2·75.

Book Review and Notice: The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning

Book Review and Notice: The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning

Suffering & Sovereignty: Recent Canadian Jewish Interest in Indigenous People and Issues

This essay analyzes ways that Canadians Jews have been engaging with Indigenous people and issues since the turn of the millennium. It argues that communal Jewish interest in Indigenous issues developed in the wake of the Ahenakew affair in 2002, and then grew in breadth and depth after the launch of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008. The expansion of Jewish engagement in Indigenous matters bespeaks newfound mobilizations by Canadian Jews in the identity politics of ethnic/religious coalition building, toward multiple and sometimes competing ends, two of which are particularly salient: suffering and sovereignty. While the sufferings of the Jewish people and Indigenous peoples have been inexactly mapped onto one another, the attachments that many Canadian Jews have to the legacies of oppression, resistance, and recovery have profoundly shaped their eagerness to contemplate and engage Indigenous issues in particularly Jewish ways. Jewish engagements with First Nations also focus on the idea of “indigeneity” for the rhetorical power it may provide in debates about Israel as a colonial, post-colonial, or anti-colonial state. Canadian Jews to champion liberal support of First Nations, Jewish conversations around Indigenous suffering, heritage honour, and reconciliation have also foregrounded a set of tense questions about the extent to which Canadian Jews are and have been implicated in colonialism writ large, and about how Canadian Jews can or should best respond to its legacies. The two themes, suffering and sovereignty, are intertwined in a dynamic and unresolved tension, with one theme (suffering) inherently grappling with powerlessness, and the other (sovereignty), inherently grappling with power.

Judaism and bereavement

The Jewish way of death is a simple, thoughtful, ever sensitive set of ritual practices based on faith and guided by the wish to console the bereaved intelligently. Knowledge of it, and the resolve to utilize its wisdom, hold out a ray of light in our blackest moments. It can help us find the path leading out of the valley of shadows.

The Palestine Impasse

the complex problems of international affairs, none evokes more passionate emotions and bitter partisanship than that of the future of Palestine. This tiny notch of covers a mere 10,000 square miles, chiefly desert, stretching along the Mediterranean Sea only some 125 miles the distance, say, from Toronto to Belleville. But this minuscule region is a major mine-field because of its explosive ingredients, strategic, political, social, economic, and religious (it is the Holy Land of the three monotheistic world-religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). There are three cardinal factors in the Palestinian problem: Jewish Zionist nationalism, Pan-Arabism, and British mandatory control (which may be widened into an international trusteeship). The high explosive ingredient of the Palestine imbroglio is the movement of political Zionism to establish a Jewish State there, to be effected by an unrestricted immigration policy which will turn the Jews now in the minority into the dominant majority. The Zionists, using an argument from history, contend that Palestine is really Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), where during a millennium the Hebrews as a nation developed their great original culture, and made their creative contribution to the world's spiritual treasury in the form of Judaism and the Jewish way of life. Since the Diaspora (Dispersion) by the Romans, 70-135 A.D., the Jews have been cribb'd, cabin'd. and confined in other countries, scourged by anti-Semitic persecution. Being a homeless, hopeless, alien, uprooted race, the Jewish people must have a homeland and state of their own in Palestine, where their genius would attain unrivalled heights of achievement. This Zionist philosophy was galvanically formulated by Dr. Theodor Herzl in his book The Jewish State (1898). The Arabs, however, challenge this Zionist argument and assert that Palestine in the light of history belongs to the Arab inhabitants, both Moslem and Christian, rather than the Jews.

Jewish Education and the Jewish Way of Life

Jewish Education and the Jewish Way of Life